ejne7

Recent Entries

Hello! I'm learning to make comics and novels and bun cha ha noi. I live in Cambridge, UK, with a stack of books, a zoologist, and a banana palm. My favourite Foucault work is Madness and Civilization and my favourite Green Lantern is Guy Gardner.

I got some brilliant 40p comics at Kapow and Scans Dailied them here. Check it out, unless you think you can go on living without knowing how, *in canon*, Captain Atom essentially used fanfiction to get into Blue Beetle's good books.

I thought I'd collect the ten best articles I read last year about writing craft and technique. They cover a mixture of subjects for creators of comics and novels, but I think they all offer something to writers of either stripe.

I should say that the posts weren't all published last year - that's just when I cottoned on to them.

Thanks to my esteemed colleagues at Hive Mind Comics, I've started reading Ex Machina. As a big Wildstorm and BKV nerd this is an embarrassing admission in October of 2010. I've been busy, all right? Vaughan hits a lot of my comics-should-be-good hot buttons - characters who are likeable while still being high-functioning assholes; characters who have actual friends - and why is this so rare in all fiction?; storylines that open with mayoral elections. (I read too much James Ellroy at too impressionable an age. As far as I'm concerned, you only really got a story if you're in a grimy alleyway papered with faded campaign posters and paved with even-more-faded dreams. And crack.) But the thing I want to talk about here's the way he delivers one of my all-time favourite fiction tropes: the ambiguous event.( Read more... )

You know, though, the idea that the December issues of Wildcats and The Authority will be the last ever suggests a mindblowingly rare opportunity in mainstream superhero comics: to tell a story that's really about the end of the world.

I mean, really about the end of the world. To write an apocalypse that isn't a continuity reboot. To sweep everything away not with the intention of building it back up again in a way that'll appeal better to new readers, or better suit a new editor's agenda. To create something that isn't an event, but the end of events, that isn't "AFTER WHICH THE UNIVERSE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!" but "AFTER WHICH THE UNIVERSE WILL NEVER BE!" It never happens (in the things I read, at least - shout me if you can think of a case when it does) - even if the writers mean for a story to be the last, shared universes make it almost impossible for this to stick (or at least impossible for fans to take seriously an attempt to make it stick). What might a superhero comic look like that wrote this idea seriously, terminally, that was really going to be the end? That had to make meaning for its characters in the face of there never being a retcon, a reboot, or another story? What if you wrote a comic that didn't leave its characters only comics-dead?

Is this what a really atheist comic would be like?

You know who could've done something like this damn well: Warren Ellis.

And there's probably your trouble.

As someone who wants to make comics the death of Zuda also looks a bit like another narrowing of the ways.

I bought comics! It's weirdly exhilarating to get them on the same day as the Americans. I feel much more in touch with the zeitgeist. (Though apparently this is shortly to become the normal state of affairs anyway.)

The Six Reasons Jaime Reyes Is Still With Us, or, Pebbles on Ted Kord's grave

I don't think this is as rare as it's made out to be, so you needn't offer medals, but I adore both Jaime Reyes (Blue Beetle III) and Ted Kord (his adorkable dead predecessor). And having finally, months after everyone else, read the superbly provocative "Racial politics of regressive storytelling" at Comics Alliance, I want to ramble on and on about something: why, unlike the numerous legacy characters that essay discusses, hasn't Jaime been bumped off to bring Ted back? I mean, Jason Rusch is dead(ish) so Ronnie Raymond can come back? I've got to think there are more Ted-lovers out there than there were people clamouring for the return of Ronnie Raymond. So why's Jaime still going strong (except for, you know, his book getting shitcanned and his backup feature getting cancelled and not even being in bloody Teen Titans any more and yeah, the new JLI, that's not going to be a poisoned chalice) while Ted is lying unremembered in the dirt at Vanishing Point? What makes Jaime immune (or is it, what makes Ted unsaveable)?